The Kindle Digital Text Platform
January 3, 2008
I was rooting around on Amazon the other day, seeing what other kind of (non-book) content was available for the Kindle when I discovered the Digital Text Platform Amazon has made available for publishing content in Kindle format. “DTP” is listed as Beta, but I found it functional and easy to use. Basically you create all the metadata for the title, including pricing information, and then upload the content for conversion to the Kindle format. To test it, I created an eBook out of a series of articles I have written on content management and XML. They seem to want HTML (“The preferred format for uploading content is as a single HTML file”), but I got impatient when I then read you needed to assemble linked images in a zip file using special instructions. So I went with a single Word .doc file (“standard .doc files will often convert without a hitch”). For the most part, it did convert without a hitch, though it did a woefully bad job with a small number of very simple tables. To work around that, I simplified a couple of the tables and deleted the others. In fairness to Amazon, I worked quickly, and could have experimented with HTML tables.
If you’re a Kindle owner and happen to buy the title, I would love to hear from you about the experience. Since I don’t own a Kindle yet, I had to rely on the preview capability in DTP, which basically gives you an HTML view of the content.
From the introduction to the eBook:
The following articles, white papers, and blog entries were written between 2000 and 2006. They appeared in one of several publications: The Gilbane Report, eContent Magazine, E-DOC Magazine, or Transform Magazine. Some appeared in my blog, www.billtrippe.com, or its predecessor blog, Ideas in Technology and Publishing. I undertook this compilation as an experiment in working with the beta version of Amazon.com’s Digital Text Platform for creating content for the Kindle eBook reader.
I only edited the material lightly, so the articles are showing their age in places. Some links are likely out of date, some product references may be to versions of products that have since been superseded, and at least one product, XMetaL, has changed corporate ownership at least once since first written about in one or more of these articles. However, I chose these articles from many, many others I could have chosen because the material is evergreen and still useful, I think. I stand by what has been written here, especially for the price!
Posted by Bill Trippe at January 3, 2008 8:56 AM
